ROCKFORD — Guilford High School’s 52-year-old student newspaper, the Voyager, may have rolled off the press for the last time on May 15.

The school’s newspaper class, which produces the Voyager, did not generate enough student interest for the 2014-15 school year to justify keeping it in the curriculum, Guilford Principal Janice Hawkins said.

Hawkins said her decision to cut the course from the curriculum came after only 10 students had enrolled in the class for the next school year.

“We don’t run classes that are below 20 (students),” Hawkins said. “It’s not fiscally sound to do that.”

This year’s newspaper students have been doing everything they can to persuade the school to keep the class — they’ve been writing letters and emails to school leaders and recruiting fellow students to sign up for the class.

Sophomores Kristin Weyburg and Jenna Lee took their case to the School Board last week. Dan Bingley, a Guilford English teacher who runs the newspaper class, asked administrators to reconsider the decision and submitted a list of names of 21 students interested in enrolling in the class. He and his students were still waiting to hear the school’s final decision as of Friday afternoon.

Lee and her classmates fear the Voyager will go out the same way as Auburn High School’s student paper, which published for the last time in 2009.

“It’s going to be hard once it’s cut to bring it back,” Lee said.

Hawkins offered two options that still would allow a student newspaper to be published ­— newspaper students could be absorbed into already existing journalism or yearbook classes from which they could still publish a paper, or they could form a newspaper club that would operate before or after school.

Junior Ally Pruitt, the paper’s student life editor, said that an after-school club wouldn’t work because many of the reporters and editors have part-time jobs and participate in school sports.

“We don’t think it’s fair to make us choose between sports, work and newspaper,” she said.

Pruitt was slated to take over as one of the Voyager’s top editors along with junior Savannah Nieves. They have worked their way up through the ranks of the paper for the past two years, and to see the paper die just before they take the reins has been difficult to accept, they said.

The Voyager is as old as the school itself. Its first issues were published in 1962, the year the high school opened, and Pruitt said shutting down the newspaper will affect more than just the students interested in practicing journalism.

Newspaper was not the only course axed for next school year — African-American history along with Advanced Placement physics, computer science and Spanish courses were unable to generate enough student interest to continue.

“Obviously, I would like to offer all of those classes,” Hawkins said.

But the school gives priority to core classes that students must take to graduate, and classes that are not required are the first to go when student interest is low.

“It’s totally based on enrollment,” Hawkins said.

Sophomore Nathan DeBoer was interested in enrolling in the newspaper class for next year to get hands-on experience with graphic design and cartoon drawing. He would be sad to see the school newspaper go.

“The newspaper has been around for so many years, I think it’s the end of an era,” DeBoer said.